Left-wing agitators showed up to a town hall meeting in Louisiana for Sen. Bill Cassidy (R) on Wednesday and shouted, screeched and heckled during the opening prayer and the veteran-led pledge of allegiance, booing loudest when the pastor closed the prayer with "in Jesus' name."

The New Orleans Times-Picayune reports that after the meeting came to an end, Cassidy met Louisiana State Chaplain Michael Sprague, who had led the prayer, in the hallway and had an exchange about what had just taken place:

Sen. Bill Cassidy had to know he was facing a tough crowd when they tried to shout down the invocation. "Amen!" one man hollered just moments after Louisiana State Chaplain Michael Sprague began his prayer. "Let's get on with it."

"Pray on your own time," another shouted, "this is our time."

A group of women near the back of the packed room at East Jefferson Parish Library chanted: "Separation of church and state. Separation of church and state."

Cassidy never seemed to get rattled, but a little while after the rowdy exercise in democracy came to an end, the senator spotted Sprague in a hallway.

"Thanks for doing that, Mike," Cassidy said. "Wow, they booed the name of Jesus."

Cassidy is a former medical doctor who organized volunteers to open a makeshift hospital in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The agitators who came to his town hall meeting apparently think of him as a "mean-spirited demon who wants to rip healthcare away from innocent children," according to Town Hall, because he has offered a replacement plan for Obamacare.

Protesters have been disrupting GOP town halls across the nation, causing enough ruckus that many GOP lawmakers are skipping their own regularly scheduled town hall meetings to avoid facing the agitators. Left-wing filmmaker Michael Moore may have sparked the protests when he published a list of town hall events he called the "Resistance Calendar" on Monday via Twitter.

Since then, many GOP congressional members, including House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz of Utah, Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton and Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, have faced backlash at their town hall events. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders (I) warned Thursday that the town hall protests are "just the beginning."